076 - How to Write a Clear Purpose Statement
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Show Notes:
How to write a purpose statement. It seems a little daunting, doesn't it? All right, I have to enter this episode with the worst mission statement of all time. It's actually like the best worst mission statement of all time. And then we'll play a little game after I read it, you can guess what company it is, all right? All right, this is it:
“We provide our products and services with the dedication to the highest degree of integrity and quality of customer satisfaction, developing long-term professional relationships with employees that develop pride, creating a stable working environment and company spirit.”
Any guesses?
Dunder Mifflin Paper Company.
That is their mission statement. And actually I think the Michael Scott Paper Company is the actual worst, which says, "I will not be beat, I will never give up, I am on a mission," that is the Michael Scott guarantee I can not get through this without laughing.
I feel like this might be the best intro ever to a podcast episode because of all The Office references, but here's what I want to do in this episode today: I want to help you write a really, really good mission statement and maybe even reframe your entire thinking about a mission statement and what you even call it.
Because for the most part, mission statements are just too wordy and a bunch of gobbledygook that doesn't help you or clarify your vision. So if you've never written one for your work, or if you have one, but you can't recite it right now off the top of your head and you don't really believe in it: this episode is for you.
For the full episode, hit play above or read through it below!
About halfway through this year in late June, early July, I realized I'd been working the entire year without a mission statement. I had a great one for Nancy Ray Photography, but I just never wrote one down for Work and Play. And there were so many reasons. I mean, I really didn't think I needed one. I didn't have a big team, starting over brand new business work, working one day a week. It just didn't really feel necessary. I knew I could get by without it and I have, I've been doing fine. Also, sometimes when people talk about mission statements, I don't know if this applies to you or not, but I just get tired of hearing about “Mission Statements” or “What's your why?” Or I don't know, it feels like it's too big to tackle.
It also just feels like they’re really nice things say, but they don’t actually have any meat. I don't know. This is inner-side-me thinking out loud here, but it just feels too monumental or maybe even dated, I don't know.
Anyway, it just feels daunting, so the bottom line is I got halfway through this year and I realized I needed more direction and more clarity. It actually happened one time when my friend messaged me, we're using Marco Polo, which I have been loving during this whole COVID season, just to have face to face conversations with friends that live far away from me. And she just messaged me and was like, "So what's your thing? What are you trying to do with your podcast and Instagram and your work right now? What are you trying to do?"
And I was like, "I mean, I like teaching about work and play in life, in faith, in home," and I was like, "I really, I don't know how to answer you clearly." And that got me thinking like, "I need this clarity in my work, I need this direction."
It was time for me to stop and write this mission statement so that I knew how to clearly answer people, not just for them, but for me. I wanted to know what I was waking up to work on every day.
All of what I just explained to you, where mission statements seem daunting and big—it doesn't matter how you or I feel about that.
The truth is: if we don't have those things clearly understood and written down in our work,
we are like a ship that doesn't have a radar.
We are going and moving and working our tails off, but we don't know where we're headed or what we're doing. The thing is your mission statement, your goal in work, it can't just be to show up to work, to make money. That is going to fizzle out at some point. We have to have a greater why and a greater purpose behind our work. Work has to be so much more than that, or we're just going to go from job to job to job and never really feel satisfied. And that's really what writing this is all about.
So in June, I took almost an entire workday to figure out what this was for me. And let me tell you, my workdays are gold, I work one day a week and I put everything else I had to do on pause and I tackled this. Now I'm going to tell you five things that you need to know about writing your mission statement. And then I'm going to tell you the exact guidelines to follow so that you can write yours this week if you don't have one. And I don't care if you are a business owner or not, you need to have a work purpose statement, which leads me to my first point:
1. You don't have to call it a mission statement.
Most of what I've learned about writing a “mission statement” or a “work purpose statement” or “core purpose statement,” most of what I've learned about this can be found in the book called Traction.
And if you want to learn more about that book, just go listen to Episode 026. It has a great recap of the entire book and why I love it so much, it's my favorite business book of all time. But in this book, Traction, they lay out an entire entrepreneurial operating system called EOS. And if you're running your company on EOS, then you have a business purpose in this core focused section of your vision traction organizer. I know I'm getting into the weeds a little bit here of EOS, get the book, you can speak the language and know exactly what I'm talking about. But basically it's like your mission statement, it is your purpose or cause or passion. It's the reason that your business or your work exists. And you pair that, that big purpose or cause or passion together with your business niche. Like actually what you do day to day in your work, whether you're selling pizzas or if you're creating stationery or if you're a photographer. Whatever it is, it's your bigger purpose paired with your niche, okay?
And so those two things together form your work purpose statement or your mission statement or whatever you want to call it. I think for the purposes of this episode, I'll call it your work's purpose statement.
You could call it mission statement, your business purpose statement, but I know a lot of people listening might just have a side gig, side hustle, might own a business, might not own a business, you might actually work for someone else. And so I just want to call it your work purpose statement, just to get you out of the practice of thinking of it as mission statement and trying to call it something new. Is a good exercise to do, but it is really about your work and the purpose behind your work and a clear statement that will clarify and enhance your work. So, we'll call it a work purpose statement for the remainder of this episode.
The bottom line is you can call it whatever you want, whatever serves you best, you get to decide. But I feel like mission statement, I don't know, might feel a little bit dated or it might not be a good fit. I just want to encourage your brain to think of it in a new way, okay? Let's keep it simple and fresh. So that's point number one is, you don't have to call it a mission statement, you get to choose what you call whatever feels best to you.
2. This work purpose statement, it's going to take a little bit longer than you think to write it.
It's going to require some deep thinking and I'm speaking from experience because I just went through this, but your brain is going to fight you on it.
What's going to happen most likely is you'll write one down immediately and think, "Oh, great, great. Oh yeah. That's it, that's beautiful." Like, "Hey, I got it. I've got my big purpose cause or passion and it's paired with my niche and this is it." And then you're going to read it and it's going to be like two or three sentences long, or maybe you forgot some other important part of it or maybe... I don't know, it's just not going to be very easy to remember. And you have to do the work to continue to prune and try different words and try different scenarios and pair different things together until you get to the gold, until you get to the really good stuff and that process takes time. I remember us doing this with Nancy Ray Photography several years ago and I decided to tackle it.
I was in the middle of reading Traction, my husband and I were leaving to come home. I think we had just gone camping with our friends and we were driving home with a three hour drive in front of us. And I was like, "I really want to work on my Nancy Ray Photography work purpose statement.” And he was like, "Okay, let's do it." And he was great because I mean Will is just brilliant. And I get to bounce ideas off of him all the time, I'm so thankful for him. Bottom line was, I thought we were going to do this in about 30 minutes and it took the entire three hour drive home to do this. And we didn't take breaks, we hashed it out, we talked about it, we pieced all different kinds of words together.
We first worked on the great cause or purpose of the business. What was it that we were doing?
And then we talked about the niche and everything that I did in my business and how all that included, but what were the real core things that we did in our work?
And so we had to pair all of that down and what we came up with was:
Glorifying God and inspiring legacies.
That was our greater costs, a greater passion, glorifying God and inspiring legacies through photography and education. And photography and education was what I did in the history of photography, I served families and weddings and couples and I educated other photographers on how to build a team and shoot in film and shoot in digital. So,
Glorifying God inspiring legacies through photography and education.
That was so clarifying for me, for our team in that what we were trying to do was to inspire. And it was good, but it took a long time to write it.
So it's going to take you a little bit longer than you think, and your brain might fight you on it. You might want to settle early on, but I just encourage you to keep going.
3. Once you land on a statement, once you feel really good about your work's purpose, what I want you to do is try it out for three months before calling it official.
Sit with it for a whole quarter, talk about it, use it in your language even if it's just you and your business, write it down, frame it on your desk, look at it all the time and make sure that it settles really well in your spirit, and that it's good and you're really proud of it; that you can recite it and that it means something to you. And then after three months, you get to change it if you don't love it, you get to work on it.
But you need to make sure that it's worth keeping because you're excited about it.
4. It should be very short, it should be clear, and it should be in writing.
The most hilarious thing about the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company mission statement is, it's so long and so wordy and no one knows what they do. You have no idea that it's a paper company and you have no idea what they're actually trying to achieve. They just use the best sounding words, like products and services and integrity and quality and relationships and pride in a stable working environment and spirit. It's like all this stuff that sounds good, but ultimately no one knows what the heck they're doing or what they're trying to accomplish in that mission statement. It's very wordy, I mean, literally you could slap that mission statement on any business, right? And any business could say, "Sure, that's mine,” but it's not a good one, it's terrible.
Your work purpose statement should be very short, clear and in writing, and it should be something that you can easily memorize and recite to anyone you speak to.
5. A good purpose statement is made up of two parts.
The big vision of your why, like we talked about, the greater purpose behind your work. This can be something like glorifying God or mending lives or bringing people together or eradicating slavery or whatever it is, it's like the big goal, the passion, the cause, the thing that is driving you and your work. What are you trying to do? It's not about making money, it's not about achieving a certain number. It is about moving something in the world, moving good into the world.
Yeah, it's got to be bigger. It's got to be something that lights your heart on fire that you get excited about. So, that's the first part about it.
And then the second part of your work purpose statement should be your niche, the actual work that you do, what is it? Do you paint nails? Do you take pictures? Are you an author or copywriter or do you make the most amazing pizzas? What is it? What do you do in your actual work? Because there's something that you do or a service that you provide that is very specific to you and what you do. And so a good work purpose statement has to include both of those things, what you actually do, and then the big vision of your why. Okay, so let's talk about how you can actually come up with one that you're excited about, and you can write it down.
Now, if you've never done this before, or if you have a work purpose statement or a mission statement already and you're just not that pleased with it or you think this isn't doing it for me, this is not encouraging and inspiring, I can't recite it off the top of my head right now. I don't know what it is, I don't know really clearly what I'm doing, I'm not excited about it. Then I want you to do this exercise. I want you to start over and this is what you're going to do:
Get a blank sheet of paper or a fresh Google Doc and take time to answer these two questions—
Question one, why do you exist? Why does your work exist? What is the greater purpose, cause or passion behind your work? Why do you exist?
And then number two, the second question is what do you actually do in your work? What do you do?
Now, I want you to take some time, brainstorm, light a candle, get a fresh cup of coffee.
This is the good stuff, this is the good stuff of work. Don't dread this. Get excited because this is why you show up at your work. You're about to write it down, so get excited and I want you to just write and write and write, write what comes to your mind, whatever comes to your mind. You might have two or three clear bullet points for each question, you might have 10 to 15 bullet points for each question. It doesn't matter, I want you to get it all out of your brain because the more things you write, the more things that you come up with, you're going to get clarity in your work as you write it all out, okay?
So brainstorm everything under those two points. Answer those questions. After you do that, I want you to take another sheet of paper and write down these seven points. Now these are your seven guidelines to a great work purpose statement, an amazing one. If you follow these seven points, then yours is going to be awesome, okay?
It's written in simple language.
It's big and bold.
It has an “aha” effect; it makes you excited.
It comes from the heart.
It involves everyone.
It's not about money.
It's bigger than a goal.
Write those seven points down and what you're going to start doing is, you're going to start looking back to the answers of those first two questions, why do you exist? And what do you actually do in your work?
And you are going to start pulling common words or themes or maybe one of them, maybe just one thing that you wrote down jumps out and you're like, "That's it." And you’re going to start to draft several different statements, sentences that you come up with and put together these puzzle pieces to create something beautiful.
After you get maybe one or two or three versions of it, I want you to circle the words that really set your heart on fire, that really make the most sense for you.
Then I want you to take the three, two or three drafts that you've made and pare them down so that they fit into those seven points.
And you start asking yourself these questions. Let's make it into one sentence. Okay, is this sentence written in simple language? Is it big and bold? Does it have an “aha” effect? Does it come from the heart? Does it involve everyone? Is it about money or is it not? And is it bigger than a goal now?
No one can do this work but you, no one can get to this final step and craft this statement but you. And don't put it off because it might take time. I get it. I mean, it might take a little while. Now for you it might not take as much time as it did for me. But let me just encourage you with this: it takes what it takes. This is important work, gaining clarity on the purpose of your work, why you show up and give hours to your work it's worthy of your time, it's worthy of your work.
I'm going to give you a quick inside glimpse of how I got to my work purpose statement just recently and it's in that three month trial window as I share it with you. So I might tweak it or change it completely. I mean, who knows, but right now I don't think I will. I really like what I came up with. And so I'm taking a risk sharing it with you now because I don't feel like it's totally perfected yet. But I'm sitting with that and I feel like it's better to be raw and just share it like it is and where I am in this process instead of coming up with it, totally polished and ready to go because they feel like that's more helpful.
Also, I want to say, it's really helpful to just bounce ideas off of someone that you trust, whether it's someone that you work with or someone that's close to you, they can really help you work out the intricacies of this or help you with language or help you see your blind spots or maybe add in a couple of different words.
I worked with Sammy Jo, who works with me, and we both brainstormed the answers to these questions together, which was really helpful. And then I also took it to Will my husband that evening and just talked with him about it for a while. And it's just really helpful, I think, to have someone to talk to about this.
So here is how I got to my new Work and Play work purpose statement.
Why do I exist as a brand?
marking the goodness of God
mirroring his goodness in every way
building lasting legacies
to give rise to other women or to inspire others
recentering
refocusing
eternal mindset
empowering women to see the big picture
calling people up
These were the words that I just wrote down, that we wrote down and brainstormed together why we exist.
So what exactly do I offer?
creating spaces for women to integrate different facets of their lives (work/faith, work/home, work/play)
giving women the confidence to integrate their lives independently and innovative-ly
content that moves women deeper in their faith
productive in their work and flourishing in their homes
inspiring life and legacy through practical faith-filled teachings
living an integrated life
the contentment challenge
legacy photo system
providing practical systems for women
And after brainstorming those two long lists and trying out, I don't know how many different purpose statements that I came up with. I finally got my work purpose statement:
Practical tools for an integrated life.
Practical tools for an integrated life. Six words and I'm so grateful for it. I'm so proud of it and it's amazing how long it took me to come up with those six little words. I mean, I'm talking hours and several drafts crossed out, rewritten, long conversations with Sammy Jo, hashing it out, talking with Will about it literally in bed before we went to sleep.
And that's when it dawned on me and you might be thinking, "Is that it?"
And I get that. It's simple. It's short. You might be thinking like, "Wait, what? That's the word purpose statement?" And I'm here to tell you, yes, that is it, it's short, it's easy to remember. My niche is providing practical tools, just like this one I'm talking about today, providing you with a practical tool to write a work purpose statement in your life. And it's for an integrated life, integrating integrated living is the big core purpose and passion and focus that I am all about.
And you might be thinking, "Nancy, what is an integrated life?" And I'm happy to answer that question. It's a life that's lived with faith at the center of it, that faith is integrated in everything you do. Living an integrated life also acknowledges that we are human beings, we aren't compartmentalized but we are whole.
I'm a follower of Jesus and a wife and a mama and a creator and a teacher. I have dreams. I love work and nerdy stuff like work purpose statements and core values. I run half marathons, I love coffee and all these different aspects and loves and roles and responsibilities in my life should be integrated together because I'm a person. I'm complex. I made in God's image and I can show up better in each area of my life when my faith and my relationship with him is infused into every part of it and as the center of it all.
That is an integrated life; Work and Play provides practical tools for an integrated life.
Can you tell that I'm excited about that and I just want to turn the question back to you—what about you? What about you and your work? Are you willing to take the time to write down this statement for the first time or maybe re-write it so you can get excited about it and clear on what it is that you're showing up for every day?
I shared a little bit about this process on Instagram a few months ago and one of the most encouraging DMs that I got was from someone who is a professor who said that my posts about writing this (because this was in the middle of when I was working it out), but she said that writing her purpose statement helped her gain clarity on her classes because she's a professor and she teaches several different classes. And she said that she took the time to write a purpose statement for every single class and she provides that purpose statement to every student at the beginning of the semester. That it would keep her on track for the purpose of what she was teaching and why, and her students would have the same clarity.
How awesome is that?
You don't have to be a business owner to get clarity in your work. You could write a work purpose statement for your home, if you are a stay at home, mom, your work is to be the CEO of your home and you can write a beautiful work purpose statement for that. And again, you can call it whatever you want, go back to mission statement if you want to call it that. Call it work purpose statement, your core purpose, your core focus in life, whatever it is, it can work for you. But the most important thing is that you have one, don't be caught up in it being so perfect or comprehensive that you always put it off or never write one down or that it's a paragraph long or you can never remember it.
Listen, this isn't your most urgent work, I get that.
There's a ton of other things that you need to do today that are not as time consuming as this one, and they're probably way more urgent and important for today. But this is some of the most important work that you can do, period.
So I just want to encourage you one last time: your work purpose statement can work for you. Take the time to set aside some of those urgent things and work on what's important. I promise it's going to bring you clarity and excitement like you've never had before.
Work and Play cornerstore
This is where I share a book I'm loving and a thing I'm loving. For quick access, head to the Work & Play Cornerstore and it'll take you directly to Amazon so you can see everything I've mentioned here on the podcast or on Instagram. And I'll get a small commission from anything bought through these links, which helps me continue to bring this podcast to you every week. But the price is the normal price for you, so it's totally a win-win. Stay tuned for the Work and Play corner store at the end of every episode. And today I'm going to be adding the book, Traction, even though it's already in the Cornerstore because I've already talked about it. It's just so good. I want to redirect you back to the Cornerstore if you have not gotten that book.
And if you want to learn all about the book, you can read or listen to a cliff notes version just by going to nancyray.com/podcast/26 and listening to that episode, because I give a bird's eye view of it.
Now, the second thing that I wanted to add to the Cornerstore today is funny and unusual at least to me, but it's a snack, it's my favorite protein bar. And I don't know if that's weird to add a snack to the corner store but I love these things, I don't know if you've ever had some, but it's called the Perfect Bar. My favorite flavor is peanut butter, second favorite flavor is peanut butter chocolate chip. Listen, they're delicious, it's 17 grams of protein, clean ingredients made from ground peanut butter, organic honey, you can get them at most grocery stores. I know Target carries them. You also can order them on Amazon.
Listen, my kids love them, they're so good. I love them, I had one for lunch right before I recorded this episode honestly. And they're just so delicious. So I just had to give a plug for the Perfect Bar because I feel like I'm always on the go looking for something that's good. It's got good protein, clean ingredients and it's a win-win, usually they're like under $2 each when you can find them on special. I think full price they're like $2.50 or something, but they are so good.
That’s it for today, thanks for listening.
